The Light Ages Read online

  ‘Go on then.’

  The ginger-haired lad standing at the front of the class looked at the bolt, then up at the blackboard, which bore a phonetic transcription of what he was supposed to say whilst touching the bolt, although even these ordinary letters of the alphabet seemed now like the misspelling of an alien language.

  ‘Put your finger in the middle, idiot, or the spring’ll have the end of it off! Wouldn’t be able to pick your nose then, would you?’

  Relieved titters came from all of us who weren’t standing there at the front.

  ‘Go on. Some sort of guildsman you’ll be.’

  At last, the lad made an effort. Or perhaps he was just clearing his throat. Nothing happened. The ground beneath us thrummed.

  ‘Again—and louder. Any decent guildsman worth his salt would sing this.’

  The lad tried again. There was a loud snap. The clasp sprang open.

  ‘Go on. Lift the lid. Look inside.’

  Master Hinkton had his own party trick, which was to rap the lid of the box on the lad’s head just as he peered in. He did it now. ‘Empty, isn’t it? Just like your skull …’

  And we all laughed at that scowling fool’s antics, even though we hated him.

  ‘Look at this.’

  My father rolled up his sleeve to show me the twine-tattoo of the bruise there, the sign of his aethered labour. Down the road, Matty Brady’s dad who worked the big coal hoppers had one that went down his entire back as if a snake had curled up to sleep there. And there was a whole street of guildmasters down in lowtown who had bluish protrusions which emerged from their thumbs like the thorns of metal roses. No one knew quite what work they did, other than that it took place deep down in the bowels of the earth close to the pounding engines, and that they got paid well for it and didn’t live long. We regarded these manifestations—the scars, the scales, the ornate bruises—which we called marks of the haft, with fear, envy, awe.

  Like the cold dark beyond the moonlit glimmer of an aether pool, there was this sense of otherness waiting outside our ordinary lives. Even more than lay-offs and lost limbs and the disciplinary procedures of the guilds, the fear was always there that an excess of aether might take hold of you and heal the Mark on your wrist. From there, your fate was terrible. You would become a troll, a changeling. Of course, the guilds would still care for you and your family as the guilds always cared for their members, but the trollman would come in a dark green van to bear you off to Northallerton, that legendary asylum, where you would be used and tended for the rest of your life.

  ‘They had one of them there trolls come on West Floor yesterday,’ my father announced over tea one evening.

  ‘Really …’ My mother lost her peas from her fork. ‘You shouldn’t use that word.’

  ‘What difference does it make? Anyway it was a changeling they thought they needed because they’d made such a mess of the beamhammer that the iron had turned brittle and they’d tried all the spells and nothing else would do. But that’s pressers for you. Thing’s still not working, for all I hear.’

  ‘Did you get to see it?’ I asked.

  ‘No.’ My father worked his lips around a stray bit of gristle. ‘But the lads on bolt production swore it looked like a metal lizard and that the bread of their sandwiches was green afterwards.’

  ‘Don’t talk to your son like that, Frank. All that foolish superstition. And it’s not it, Robert. They’re people like everyone else.’

  But they weren’t—that was the whole point. Greyed flesh, lantern-eyed, hedgehog-horned, these ruined creatures of industry haunted the dead-end alleys of our childhood winter imaginings.

  He’s the Potato Man, Potato Man, Potato Man. He’s the Potato Man, la la la la la la…

  Because of what he was, or what we thought he might be, we children chose to torment the Potato Man above all the wandering guildless marts who tramped, begging, selling useless goods, sometimes thieving, across Brownheath. Most of them weren’t trolls at all, and were disfigured by accident and birth or were simply a little mad. But the Potato Man was peculiarly odd. He dressed in hooded rags, and dragged a small wheeled cart behind him, and always seemed to arrive in Bracebridge on smoke-blue winter evenings. The first thing you heard was the shrieking of those wheels arriving with the wind down the alleys. And there he would be, a figure emerging from the swarming dusk. His face, what we saw of it as he passed the streetlights, was plainly ruined, and his hands were like badly cooked sausages, fat and weeping and burnt. Whatever he was, whatever he had been, he was plainly strange beyond all ordinary strangeness.

  My mother was one of the few guildmistresses who would leave things out for these creatures on her doorstep. Old shoes, soup bones in a paper bag, stale bread, end bits of bacon. Long after I had come inside and gone up to bed, I would sometimes hear the creak of our gate and peer down from my little window at the shape which came shuffling up our short path, with that cart left abandoned in the street. Then—and quite incredibly—our door would sometimes open for the Potato Man. I would lie there in the dark, sure that I could hear the quiet murmur of my mother’s voice, and a liquid growl which could only be him. But by morning the very idea that the Potato Man had ever come into our house would be gone.

  On quiet evenings at home, I’d lie listening to the familiar sounds downstairs as my mother moved about the house, urging that final rasp of the drawer as she put away the family knives, the rumble of pulleys as she hauled the clotheshorse with its dripping load of washing up to the ceiling, and the wheezes and creaks that were given by the stairs as she ascended them. A pause. Are you asleep, Robert? Not that I ever was. Then another pause as she pondered whether to treat the steep runners up to my attic as steps or a ladder. A nimbus of candlelight would gather around the loose bun of her hair as she finally clambered up into my eaves. Hunched against the slope of the roof, our limbs pressing through the rucked coats and blankets, my mother would gather her breath.

  ‘Long ago, there was a pretty young girl named Cinderella. She lived all alone in a big old house with her stepmother and her three ugly stepsisters—’

  ‘So she wasn’t alone, then, was she?’

  ‘Wait, and you’ll see ..

  Night after night: all the myths and histories of England were mingled with her own and my imaginings. She’d tell me the stories of the founders of our family guild—those, at least, which women were permitted to discover. Then of the times of the Age of Kings when there were no guilds and nation still fought foolishly against nation, ruled by those bad monarchs in their palaces whom we had rightly tried and beheaded, and of stern knights wrapped in steel, and of Arthur and mad Queen Elizabeth, and Boadicea who fought the Romans. And once, long, long ago, before these Ages of Industry when the magic was sucked out of the earth, before even the Age of Kings, it seemed to me that this whole realm must have been filled with wonder beyond all possible dreams.

  Marvellous beasts rose from the soil like steam, there were fine white palaces, and beautiful plants jewelled every hillside …

  ‘So the Fairy Godmother appeared to Cinderella.’

  ‘Was she a changeling?’

  A beat of pounding silence.

  ‘This is just a story, Robert.’

  ‘Then tell me something true. Tell me about Goldenwhite.’

  ‘Well …’

  There was always both a smile and a hesitancy in my mother’s voice when she spoke about Goldenwhite up in my attic room. Like most working-class people, she harboured a fondness for the idea a woman of scarcely guilded beginnings who could rise to challenge, if only briefly, the might of the guilds. But my mother was a guildswoman as well, and her loyalties were tugged both ways at the thought of a creature who had been able to use the magic as naturally as breathing, and yet who had led an uprising which had approached the walls of London. Still, if I held my breath for long enough and crossed all of my fingers under the blanket and squirmed my toes in my own youthful spell, the pleasure of telling a good stor
y would generally win.

  ‘Goldenwhite—well, that wasn’t her real name. But no one knows what her real name was, or what part of England she came from, although a great many places claim her. Even the stupid people of Flinton with their dreadful slagheap up the road with nothing but coal in their ground claim that she was born there can you believe that? But anyway. Goldenwhite was sixteen when people realised she was a changeling, although she must have known long before that. You see, she was quite ordinary to look at, even if she was pretty, and in those days, they didn’t have a Day of Testing …’

  So Goldenwhite fled into the forests which then still covered so much of this land. There, she talked with the beasts, and she forded streams, and made the strange acquaintance of the people who would become her band of followers; changelings and madmen, the deformed and denied, marts of every shape and kind—everyone, in fact, whom the guilds and aether had damaged and dispossessed. And, drifting out through the tree-hung mists, shy at first but gaining strength and beauty from her radiance, gathered the creatures of every legend. Robin Hood and Lancelot and the Lady of the Lake; Snow White, Cinderella, Rapunzel, the Lord of Misrule and the Green Man. They were all there.

  ‘Goldenwhite, she promised her people a kingdom, and it was both a new kingdom and an old one. In some stories, she called it Avalon, and in others they say it’s Albion, although that’s just another name for this country of ours. But in the best tales, the ones you hear around these parts, it’s Einfell, and it’s a place which lies next door to this world which Goldenwhite had somehow visited when she was young, and had brought some of its light back with her when she returned. Einfell, it glowed out of her smile, and was the reason people flocked to hear her voice and feel her gaze which was like sunlight ..

  I willed on the procession of Goldenwhite’s so-called Unholy Rebellion as her ragged army tramped south and finally looked down on the walls of London from her encampment above it on the Kite Hills.

  ‘By then she had met Owd Jack. And Owd Jack was a changeling as well. He had torture marks on his hands—holes like wood knots—and there was a sort of blackness about him, but he seemed much like the sort of folk Goldenwhite already had with her, and she was happy to have him along. Owd Jack was her general, and the battles that she fought there and won, they were Owd Jack’s doing …’

  That was as dark and as bloody as things ever got in the stories which my mother told me. There never was a final battle outside the walls of London when Owd Jack betrayed Goldenwhite and brought her in chains to the men of the guilds. In our tales, she never did burn at the stake in Clerkenwell. Instead, it was a joyous journey, filled with surprises and miracles, with new healings and legends hatching at every milestone. The squirrels hopped from tree to tree and the birds sang above Goldenwhite’s lordly procession as the forest spread endlessly before them, its soft darkness laced with gold and shadow. Any moment now, the next turn or that afternoon at the latest, they would reach the place she spoke of, the place she promised, which wasn’t London at all, or even really England or Albion, but Einfell …

  My mother sat there for a long moment as the words fell away, the fingers of her left hand gently kneading the small grey scar on her palm which I had sometimes noticed but which she would never explain. The candle shifted and glinted. The songs and the forest receded. A dog down the street was barking, a baby was crying. The wind whispered in the tiles, gently stirring the attic cobwebs. And deep down, beneath everything, rising up through the bricks and timbers of Brickyard Row, was that other sound. SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.

  ‘Tell me more.’

  She kissed my forehead and laid her fingers across my lips to silence me. Their tips flesh smelled faintly of the hearth. ‘You’ve had enough wonders for one night, Robert.’

  But I never had.

  Then there was a Midsummer Fair down on the rivermeads, and the heat in the house on that long-awaited summer’s morning, and sitting at the kitchen table, and studying my mother across its surface as she bustled about in her apron, and my wondering if she really would keep her promise to take me to see a real, live dragon. And then we’re outside in the simmering light, we’re down across the stone and liveiron bridge that gave this town its name—and standing on the far meadow on the quiet Nineshiftday before the Halfshiftday when the true glories of the fair will supposedly start. There are patched tents with sun—faded stripes. There are ropes of engine pipe coiled amid the cowpats like lost bits of intestine. There are shouts and sounds of hammering. There are wagons sprawled everywhere. The engines that will drive the rides, small things by the standards of Bracebridge, were slumbering and clacking, barely smoking, unattended by their masters. There was a sense that we’d come too early, that nothing was ready. Still, an aproned man took our money as, my left hand clutching my mother’s, my right a sticky ball of aniseed, we stumbled across the parched grass in search of my dragon.

  A smell of shit and fireworks as we stood before a large hutch propped on bricks amid spindly thorns in the corner of the field. The creature gazed back at us through the peeling wooden bars from its bed of damp newspaper. One eye was sheened with a silver cataract, but the other, greenish-gold and slotted like a goat’s, bore the dim light of something like intelligence. It yawned as it watched us, and its jaws made a crackling, splitting sound. Its teeth were rotten. A storm of flies buzzed up and re-settled as the thing stretched the cramped pinions of its wings. Its flesh wasn’t scaled, but grey, although patched with odd, sharp clumps of bristle.

  Was this a dragon? I trudged home, inconsolable. Father was still out, and Beth was at school, and the house felt stale and empty even as my mother banged the door behind her. Joining in my mouth and heart with the dull bitter taste of aniseed came a distant pounding.

  SHOOM BOOM SHOOM BOOM.

  ‘Come on, Robert. It wasn’t that bad, was it? At least you saw the dragon. Tomorrow, the day after, we’d never have got through the crowds.’

  I shrugged, staring at the scars on the kitchen table. I didn’t know then how such brutes were created: that, in its way, it was a fine achievement for some beastmaster to have twisted the body of a cat or pig or dog or chicken so it grew to such an extent that its origins were almost unrecognisable. But I sensed that it represented an act of pollution—that it came from the very opposite of the fierce fires of aspiration from which, in the time and the place called Einfell of which Goldenwhite had sung, all such creatures of artless magic had once dwelt.

  ‘The world’s full of surprises.’ My mother leaned her hip against my chair, she rested her elbows on the table, her fingers tracing the greyish scar on the heel of her right hand. ‘It’s just that some of them aren’t … Quite the surprise you expect them to be ..

  And the nights rolled on through the days of autumn when all the guildsmen of Bracebridge paraded with their drums and their fifes, their hats and their sashes, and the lesser guildhouses opened their doors so we children could marvel at the jewelled books and ornate reliquaries. And then the cold winds blew in over Coney Mound, and stripped the leaves off the birches, and plumed the clouds above Rainharrow. And I smiled to myself each night when my mother clambered, half-backwards, awkward as always, down the ladder through that trapdoor which led from my attic, her candle guttering and fading but the dreams, the hopes, the inexpressible words, still clinging to me. And I wriggled my toes deeper into the coat lining that her body had warmed, and pushed myself away from the stirrings and the murmurings of Coney Mound and the deeper pounding which always lay beneath it, counting off the months and shifterms and days until I was adrift with the moon and the stars, looking down over the smoking chimneys of all of Bracebridge and the night-time wyreglow of its settling pans.

  From there, and the edges of sleep, slight at first as grass stirred by the wind, then gathering and shrill, the night express came sweeping through the valley. And I was there on the footplate with the steamaster, guiding his great engine as it swept through the meagre little station of our meagr
e little town. Bracebridge—a blur of allotments, wasteheaps, fields, yards, factories, houses then on into the hills, the wild barren hills with their strange lights and howlings and cool scents of peat and heather, pouring along the tracks with an aethereal glow. The train would glide beneath the boughs of forests, rush through Oxford and Slough and all the smokestack cities of the south, then clack on over great rivers and unnamed estuaries on huge arches; it would haul the reflected amber beads of its carriage windows past sandbanks and sailboats and rush-pricked marshes. It would bear me far away from Bracebridge, yet always closer to the edge of some deeper truth about my life which I always felt myself to be teetering on.

  And I was sure that truth would be marvellous.

  IV

  ‘GET UP, ROBERT!’

  I shifted, stiff and cold, from the uncomfortable position in which I’d been lying. I regathered the old coats that had pooled about me, then shuffled on my elbows across to my triangular attic window.

  ‘Come on!’ The clotheshorse rumbled in the kitchen. ‘It’s late morning!’

  It was a day at the last edge of summer. For the first time that year, the lumpy glass of my window had frosted, was scrolled over with white patterns which pulsed and re-formed in my breath. I untangled my hands to touch, making circles across the pane. Swimming down below the birch trees, a distorted version of the town was clouded with gouts of smoke and steam.